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Review: Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell Published by St. Martin's Griffin on February 26th 2013 Genre: Young Adult Format: Hardcover Pages: 325 Challenge Theme: A book with a name in the title Buy on Barnes & NobleBuy on Amazon

Synopsis:TWO MISFITS. ONE EXTRAORDINARY LOVE.

It’s 1986 and two star-crossed teens are smart enough to know that first love almost never lasts, but brave and desperate enough to try. When Eleanor meets Park, you’ll remember your own first love–and just how hard it pulled you under. A cross between the iconic ’80s movie Sixteen Candles and the classic coming-of-age novel Looking for Alaska, Eleanor & Park is a brilliantly written young adult novel.

Review:
I really, really enjoyed this book, so much so that I finished it in 3 days. Any book I can finish in a few days because I don’t want to put it down is an A+ in my book. You can go look at the list of my favorites quotes to see how much I loved this book. I made myself stop putting quotes so that this review wouldn’t be overwhelming :). I loved the writing, I loved the characters, I loved their love story, I just loved this book. I also enjoy books that go back and forth between the main characters points of view. I feel like that gives you more of a detailed story. I recommend this book to anyone who has ever felt like an outsider in some way, whether big or small.

***SPOILER ALERT***

At first I was bothered by how it was ending, the fact that Eleanor moved and just cut off contact with Park really upset me but the the last line of the book made me ok with how it was, at least the way I interpreted it. Rainbow leaves it opened to interpretation but I am a sucker for a happy ending so to me that three words on that postcard were “I love you.” What do you think of the ending?

Favorite Quotes:
“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn’t supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”

“Holding Eleanor’s hand was like holding a butterfly. Or a heartbeat. Like holding something complete, and completely alive.”

“What are the chances you’d ever meet someone like that? he wondered. Someone you could love forever, someone who would forever love you back? And what did you do when that person was born half a world away? The math seemed impossible.”

“He made her feel like more than the sum of her parts.”

“I don’t like you, Park. Sometimes I think I live for you”

“The first time he’d held her hand, it felt so good that it crowded out all the bad things. It felt better than anything had ever hurt.”

“You think that holding someone hard will bring them closer. You think that you can hold them so hard that you’ll still feel them, embossed on you, when you pull away. Every time Eleanor pulled away from Park, she felt the gasping loss of him.”

“There was something about the music on that tape. It felt different. Like, it set her lungs and her stomach on edge. There was something exciting about it, and something nervous. It made Eleanor feel like everything, like the world, wasn’t what she’d thought it was. And that was a good thing. That was the greatest thing.”

“Nothing before you counts,” he said. “And I can’t even imagine an after.”